Summary

I've received a fair amount of interest from people looking for some ispecific details of our trip so I thought I would try to summarise a few pieces of salient information as follows:-

We spent a total of 91 nights in the van, broken down as follows:-

By Country

UK               1
France      17
Spain        48
Portugal   25

By Stopover Category

ACSI Discounted Campsites                27
Other Campsites                                    20
Paid Aires & Motorhome Parking        26
Free Aires and Motorhome Parking     12
Other Free (Wild) Parking                       6

Mileage

Total Mileage                        4,901
Average Daily Mileage              53
Maximum Daily Mileage        197
Average Speed                          30 mph
Fuel Consumption                    29 mpg

Cost

Some bloggers keep a full itemised costing of their motorhome travels but in all honesty that takes time filling in spreadsheets which we would rather be spending doing other things.  Plus Lisa and I keep separate bank accounts which adds an extra layer of complication so all we can really do is take an educated guess at our overall expenditure for the 3 months we were away.  This comes in at a little over £6,000, so very roughly £2,000 a month.

We left home with full tanks and plenty of store cupboard essentials.  The outwards channel tunnel tickets were already arranged and of course the costings don't cover things like insurance, servicing and depreciation on the vehicle's value but they do include all expenditure for diesel (roughly £1,100) and LPG (€51), supermarket shopping, overnight stops, sightseeing entrance fees, public transport, eating out and drinking at bars and restaurants plus the odd souvineer.  It also includes the channel tunnel tickets for the return leg (£149) and the repair costs for when our GasLo LPG system sprung a leak (€120).  Our road toll expenditure came in at a whopping €0.85 and that was solely due to accidentally finding ourselves on a toll road near Lisbon.

We could obviously keep the costs down considerably if we chose more free camping options and didn't move around as much as we did.  We could also cut out the eating and drinking out but where's the fun in that?  What we have proved to ourselves though is that living on the road isn't just a lot of fun.  It works out cheaper than staying at home, so we intend to do a lot more of it going forward.